March 13, 2025

Those who exercise power and determine policy are generally men whose minds have been formed by events twenty or thirty years before.

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003), British historian, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (1992), introduction; Jay p.368

Should we expect it to be otherwise? Can it be otherwise? Is the solution to hand over the reins of power and policy to twenty-year-olds?

In studying any historical figure, to better understand her thinking, it always helps to know what the historian Franklin Le Van Baumer called the “climate of opinion” abroad in the land in the ten or so years after she came of age.